


By Ways I Have Not Known

by Megan



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ashen Romance | Auspistice, Casual Pale Cuddling, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Relationships, Major Character Injury, Medical Inaccuracies, Multi, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Polyamory, Quadrant Confusion, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-10
Updated: 2012-04-28
Packaged: 2017-11-03 09:23:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/379844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megan/pseuds/Megan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You're bleeding, broken, blind, and bereaved. Now what?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Laylah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/gifts).



> The sole point of AU is that Sollux didn't half-kill himself when he threw the asteroid, and thus he was not issued a ticket to the corpse party.
> 
> Any references to troll biology presume that Karkat's mutation is cosmetic and only effects his blood color; thus his core body temperature, lifespan, (lack of) psychic abilities, etc. are all in line with that of a non-mutant limeblood troll.

"We should take care of Sollux," Kanaya is saying, and you can practically hear the Capital Letters of Importance in her words. She's moved further away from you; she isn't speaking from right next to your auricular sponge clots anymore. "I am afraid we may still lose him if we do not."

_You can't come with me because you're not dead_ , Aradia had told you. Which is stupid, because you're pretty sure that in a contest between the two of you you've died more times than she has. Apparently shenanigans involving multiple dreamselves don't count, not that you'd know anymore; all you know now is that you're all still going to die (except maybe Aradia and probably Kanaya, since they've both already died in ways you're pretty sure count) and now there isn't going to be any warning swell of voices in your head, getting louder and louder and telling you it's someone's time. It's kind of comforting, really; you'd rather be caught unawares than giving everyone a useless prophecy they won't believe (or won't believe the right way) and have to deal with the fact that you'd told _them_ so but it still isn't enough.

You bite your tongue before you can say _I'm fine, KN_ because fuck, you aren't fine at all; you're bleeding from your empty ocular sockets and it's pooling in your borrowed goggles, you're bleeding from your face gash where your teeth were knocked out, and you're not entirely sure but you think maybe you're bleeding from your near-vestigial remains of a probiscial organ from the strain of the best bit of psionics you've ever pulled off. Then again, the migraine is nearly always there (so much so that you weren't the slightest bit surprised when your planet had been full of _brains and fire_ , one of them always goes along with the other) and there's definitely blood from under your goggles running down your face, so maybe you do have one hole in your face that _isn't_ bleeding.

"Anybody here know any first aid that doesn't involve amputating limbs and replacing them with robot pieces?" Strider asks, and you can't really place where he is in the room by the sound of his voice. It makes you more than a little nervous that you can't. "Because as on board with making you all a race of _cyborg_ bugs as I am, I have yet to see you all break out a set of robot eyes."

"I'll take care of this, coolkid." Terezi is closer to you than you'd thought; in fact, she's so close to you that you can practically feel the vibration of her voice in your horns. Of course she knows how to treat injuries; she'd grown up without a lusus, hadn't she? "You're way too tall for me to be your crutch, appleberry blast, so I sure hope you can walk."

"Perhaps someone who can see what they are doing without licking and thus introducing infection to the open wounds leading straight to his brain matter should accompany you to assist." Have you ever mentioned Kanaya is your favorite troll? Kanaya is your favorite troll. She should be the leader, so much is she the best troll left in existence. Fuck Strider and his unfunny jokes about robot eyes, Kanaya is leader now. Fuck, you sound stupid right now; how much blood have you _lost?_

"I'll go." Karkat worms his way under your other arm, because of _course_ the second-shortest troll here would help the shortest troll here drag your overly tall sack of damaged protein fibers and scrambled neurons into the ablution block. Then again, you're not sure how badly you want Kanaya right next to your bleeding face, and you are definitely very sure you do _not_ want Gamzee anywhere near your face in _any_ condition.

"Up you go, appleberry," Terezi says, and with that you're somehow putting one foot in front of the other again. Every step jars your brain a little more in its damaged housing, as if all your thermal jelly has melted and your bees are swarming search of a more temperate hive. You feel like that's what may have actually _happened_ in throwing this entire asteroid straight across the Furthest Ring, as if it's a simple matter of overclocking you and your mainframe-bee neurons.

You hunch over low because your helpers are so much shorter than you are, and that jars something heavy and sore in your thoracic cavity that makes you choke up what tastes like blood.

"Fuck, Sollux, you're going to be okay. _You're going to be fine_." Karkat has a particularly horrible balance of comfort and insult that nobody else can really duplicate, and it's so familiar you can almost believe him.

Step, step, step, cough. Whatever blood clot or piece of an internal organ walking has knocked loose inside of you, it feels like it's trying to claw its way up through your windtube.

"Come on, we're here now." Karkat is already wiping the blood off your mouth, even before they've completely maneuvered you into the ablution block. "We've got you, it's okay."

You flail a little bit when Terezi sets you down on the side of the ablution trap, because the thought of scouring slime searing in your burned-out, raw ocular sockets is enough to overcome even your desperate, instinctive urge to curl up into a ball and die. She's not having any of it, though, and you're so weak at this point you can't even slap her hands away effectively when she takes your goggles off and blood spills out of them to slide down your face in a rapidly-coagulating slurry.

"TZ, _don't_ ," you manage to choke out. "Please, _don't_ —"

" _Shhh_." It's Karkat who answers you, not Terezi. Shouldn't he be off making sure Gamzee isn't holding a corpse party down in the lab? Not that you're going to complain, because Karkat— who's got enough pity in his stupid little bloodpusher to shoosh _all of you at once_ , seriously, what kind of pale stud can _do_ that in real life?— is really, really good at shooshpapping. You are talking _stupid_ good at it; you can't help but stop slapping vaguely in the direction of Terezi's hands and slump down in shooshed defeat. "Shhhh, it's just water."

He's not lying, but it still _burns_ and you can hear yourself screaming. Your voice echoes up into your thinkpan and makes that ever-present headache of yours (so much so that you could almost declare it your kismesis) get louder like feedback from a microphone. Karkat still has one hand on the back of your neck, petting; the other must be the one pouring fiery saltwater torture onto your face, because you can feel Terezi's spidery little hands holding your arms down so tightly her claws puncture your skin. If anyone else is in there watching, they're being quiet enough about it you can't hear them over the sound of your own choking and sobbing.

" _Shoosh_ , you're going to get an infection if we don't clean this out." Karkat's stubbly little claws are scritching at your hairline like you're a grub and he's some bizarre kind of lusus, his knuckles kneading over places that have been tense for so long you've forgotten they're not supposed to be like that. You're crying, which is just making more of a mess they're going to have to clean out but you can't _help_ it.

" _Please_ , KK." You almost don't recognize your own voice, wheezing and thin and able to hiss out the _s_ in _please_ , and Karkat might as well not recognize it, either, for all the good it does you. "It _hurts_ — I'd rather die, fuck, _please stop_."

"I might be of some help," Lalonde says from somewhere in the void past Terezi, outside the little bubble where you can tell exactly where everyone is because their hands are all over you. "Provided vodka is not innately toxic to your species, it might make an effective sedative."

"Allow me to take a look at this sedative of yours." That's Kanaya— how many people are crowding into this tiny torture chamber of an ablution block and watching you cry like a wriggler? You should be charging admission to all of these kinky idiots, _twenty boondollars to come in and see the Sollux Captor Wet and Messy Pity Extravaganza_. So far it seems like Gamzee and Strider are the only ones with anything better to do. "I will stand to be harmed the least if it is dangerous, I think."

Karkat is murmuring pitiful nonsense about how it's almost over in your ear, too quietly for anyone besides maybe Terezi to overhear, and rubbing at your shoulders. You can't even get mad at him for getting all pale all over you, because without it you're pretty sure everyone in the room would be buried under a pile of rubble. Now that you're in the receiving end of it, you can see how he managed to talk down Gamzee with _petting_. He’s really, _really_ good at petting.

"This is fifty percent ethyl alcohol diluted in water, albeit a formulation that is strangely magnetized. We will have to be careful, but if there was ever a time for such a thing this is it." Kanaya sounds like she's _scandalized_ , which is to say she sounds like she's head over heels flushed because Kanaya Maryam _loves_ scandal like she loves heaving bosoms and purple prose.

" _What the hell_ ," Terezi says, and jerks her head up so hard it shakes you. "That is so, _so_ illegal. If the dismembouncers caught you with that they'd cull you on the spot."

"I find myself more and more in admiration of your society every moment," Lalonde murmurs. "What percentage alcohol is normally in the solution your people take recreationally?"

" _Oh fuck no_ , you are not giving that garbage to Sollux." Does Karkat have to be so _loud_ when he's right next to your face? Okay, now you _know_ you're dying of blood loss, because of _course_ he has to be that loud. And if he doesn't stop it, his voice is about to become your migraine's matesprit and join it in trolling the sanity right out of your thinkpan.

"I do not know," Kanaya says, as if she didn't just hear Karkat shout the remaining blood right out of your head. "But I would be extremely cautious, as he has lost a great deal of his blood. I am afraid that is partly my fault, as I had little choice but to feed on his blood."

Wait, when had she bitten you? Admittedly, everything is a little bit hazy— okay, a lot hazy— after having your ocular apparatus seared right out of your face and your maybe sort-of almost a potential matesprit killed in front of you and wait, when did Kanaya come back from the dead, anyway? Maybe she _did_ bite you, and you're bleeding out of holes in your neck, too; it's not like you can differentiate much between all the different knives stabbing through your skin and lighting your nervous system on fire at the same time.

You take it back. Kanaya can't be the leader, because it's completely unfair that she gets to be dead but stay here with everyone but you have to be alive but can't go back with Aradia. Karkat gets to be your favorite troll now, even though you can never tell him this because he'll either make fun of you forever or he'll say something really embarrassing and you'll have to pretend not to be his friend for two whole hours.

"What the hell, it's just vodka." Strider is there too, laughing at your misfortune, and you groan in pain and defeat; now literally everyone alive besides Gamzee can see you as an eyeless, blood-drenched mess who can't even stand up on his own.

"You don't have to take it if you don't want to." For once in his life, Karkat speaks softly, so quiet that you can barely hear him. "We won't let them make you." And you can feel Terezi's nod of agreement against your shoulder.

"No, I'll do it." Your answer makes Terezi stiffen; Karkat just skates his claws up the back of your thinkpan to scritch down between your horns. That makes things hurt just a little bit less, but not enough to change your mind about this. "I hurt so much I want to die already, and it's either going to kill me or make me feel better."

There's a bit of shuffling and the sound of a heavy object hitting the floor and rolling, and then someone is holding a cup to your lips.

"I'm afraid this is going to burn," Lalonde warns you, and tips the cup so you can drink. She isn't lying to you-- it's two mouthfuls of fire, and it stings where your fangs were knocked out almost as much as it burns your raw throat. "It will, however, help disinfect the damage in your mouth in addition to sedating you."

You don't manage more than a voiceless little rasp in return; the fire she's just fed you has burned out your voice. At least, that's what it _feels_ like for the next few minutes, and between that and the rest of it you've been reduced to muffled sobbing as they finish washing out your injuries. By then, you're pretty sure the pleasant haze that's started to descend over everything is the weird human sedative at work. But at least it _does_ work; you calm down and feel sort of disconnected from everything.

Everything sort of tilts after that; Terezi stops holding you down and starts holding you _up_. She and Karkat are putting something in your ocular sockets that makes them feel dry and tight, and you're not really sure it's an improvement over weeping blood. At least you've got a distraction from how much it hurts, because you're pretty sure without those bulge-out _insane_ drugs Lalonde (and you really like her name, it's got a ring to it— _La-londe_ , you can call her LL) has been carrying with her for no apparent reason whatsoever, you'd be screaming again. As it is, though, you're just kind of drifting away from everything. You'll have to thank her for bringing her scary culling-offense drugs with her when you can figure out how to speak something besides Alternian again.

"We should keep the goggles off, for now. Exposure to fresh air is important to wound healing." Kanaya says from wherever out there in the dark she is. She hasn't come closer this whole time, the only one of them who hasn't gotten up in his personal space at some point. "Or so I have read."

" _Rainbow drinker novels are not docu_ — no, never mind, I can't even say that now." Karkat grumbles as he wraps bandages around your head to keep the weird itch inside your empty sockets, and he sounds like an angry little grub, all _grrr bzzz click_ behind his words. It's so funny that you don't bother not to laugh at him. "Yeah, yeah, I'm hilarious, you nooklicking moron. Just remember that when you _aren't_ so high we're about to lose you into low-Alternian orbit."

"You still make grub noises when you're mad." You try to reach out and _pap_ him on the cheek (because two can play at moirallegiance cluckbeast, which happens to be a game you will probably be _awesome_ at), but your hand misses and you almost lose your balance all over Terezi.

"Pretty sure he just landed on a moon, Karkles." Terezi loops an arm around your chest, slinking under your own arms because she's not tall enough to hold you higher up. You always feel kind of weird about that, since bluebloods are supposed to be big but she's the smallest of all of you. "Let's get you to bed, appleberry blast."

"I'm not, anymore." You're not mad about it, not really. You're pretty sure you might be later, when you try to do something and fail at it because you can't see, but until that time comes you're okay. It's not even Lalonde's magnetic drug trip telling you that, either, because you'd been okay with it before that, too. "Nasty mustard, I guess that's what you have to call me now."

"Nope!" Everything lurches as she lets go of you long enough to stand up on tiptoe and lick your face, but rights itself again when someone— Karkat, of course, because he's barely bigger than Terezi— comes up and supports your other side. "You taste too bubbly to be mustard right now. Suck it up, appleberry."

"I presume you have a working alchemeiter, or else you would have all starved to death." Lalonde is far away again, her task of delivering hard drugs to you complete. "I have a few items that might be of use in creating a suitable pile for him to sleep in, if one of you would be so kind as to show me where it is."

"Somebody should probably watch him," Strider says from whatever safe vantage point he's been using to watch this entire mess without your knowing. "Shit, have you ever seen a Youtube video of drunk bees? Because that is seriously what this guy reminds me of."

" _Bzzzz_ ," you say, both because he's talking about bees and because you're still making fun of Karkat for losing all control of his tone like that earlier. You would laugh more than you do, but moving it that much really hurts your face right now and you've done such a good job of forgetting about everything that's on fire you don't want to remember it. "Should have gotten some mind honey, I'd have sent ED right into _space_. _Pchoooo_ , no more scarf-chewing asshole."

"…I'm telling you, _wasted like Youtube bees_." You can _hear_ Strider shaking his head. You know you can. It's easier to understand than his human words, even.

"I'll stay," Karkat says. Shit, you're supposed to be playing moirallegiance cluckbeast, aren't you? If you keep forgetting that, he's going to _win_ and that's just not _on_. So you lean to one side and rest your cheek on top of his head.

"Thanks, KK," you tell him, and you actually kind of mean it. He makes an odd, soft noise that sounds like he thinks this is an entirely different sort of cluckbeast game (and you realize sort of dimly that if you were thinking clearly you might prefer this one; losing a new flirtation _does_ hurt less than being abandoned by your sweeps-long moirail, so you have fewer bruises for soft, affectionate matesprit chirps to poke unwanted claws into), and reaches up to pet at the back of your neck again.

"You are _not allowed to die and leave me here with these freaks, do you hear me?_ " Even his angry orders are softer right now, as if the sight of you is making pity hemorrhage through even the worst of whatever it is that fuels his rage.

" _Bzzzz_." You give him another humming, giddy sort of buzz, which you mean to be a vague sort of affirmative, and angle your head so that one of your longer outer horns touches one of his. You can feel him shiver against you; you're going to win _matesprit_ cluckbeast, too.

"Stop those idiot bee noises, too," he says, but he rubs his horn against yours right back. "And Terezi's right, you're already way out in space. Come on, time to drag your mangled, drunk sack of chitin to whatever pile the humans put together."

The walk to whatever room they're putting you in-- your own respiteblock, as it turns out-- isn't long, but you keep stumbling over your own legs. You haven't been using for much more than a storage space, since Karkat's banned sleeping and it's too cold to keep your mainframe in and the terminals in the main computer room make keeping one in your respiteblock a redundancy. 

"Shouldn't you be keeping track of GZ?" You ask, because the last thing anyone needs is Gamzee snapping again without his moirail there to make out with him until he forgets the definition of the word murder. Even dizzy with Lalonde's bizarre metallic burn, you know _that_ much.

"Kanaya is keeping an eye on him. She's so pissed off at him right now _I'm_ almost into her in a black kind of way." Terezi answers for him before he can say anything, but you can't feel any twitching or scowling or anything like that. And Karkat has a tendency to make such big gestures and facial expressions that you would know, even without being able to see.

"Now come on, into the stupid looking pile Lalonde made you. It looks like one for a wriggler just out of the cocoon, all pillows and shit." He pulls you forward and sends you stumbling into-- well, exactly what he'd said it was. It's so soft you're practically swimming in it, and there's a thermal tarp with it-- another thing for wrigglers too tiny for a proper recuperacoon. You immediately wrap it around yourself and sink down into the pile; between your high and the plush suspension of the pile, you feel pleasantly weightless. Karkat settles down next to you and goes back to the lovely light scratching between your horns.

You finally fall asleep like that.

You wake up with your face still throbbing, your mouth dry and your nutrition-retaining digestive sack roiling. It's like your headache has spread downward to your guts, but hasn't lost any potency despite its divided force. The pile they made for you is much, much too soft; you're more used to either the comforting buoyancy of the sopor or the sharp, startling edges of the horn pile. It reminds you of glubbing in the brain pile with Feferi, just a little bit, except that had been slimy (a little more like sopor) in a way Lalonde's alchemized pillow pile isn't. You shift a little, trying to find a stable position in the too-forgiving squish surrounding you, and your arm hits someone sharing the pile with you. Oh, right, Karkat had been with you when you fell asleep.

"Watch your hand, brother," Gamzee says in his rough voice, and you jerk you claws back like he's just tried to bite them off. He laughs. "Chill out, motherfucker, I'm just here because my best palebro is asleep here on your pile. Felt like getting my cuddle on with him while he isn't all a talking spikebeast, you dig?"

That… well, that's pretty fucking creepy, actually, that he's climbed onto the pile and is nonconsensually getting his pale on instead of doing it while his moirail is competent to consent. Not that you think Karkat doesn't want to sleep next to his moirail— just the opposite, it's exactly the sort of traditional, quadrant-normative thing that totally gets Karkat off. It's just that the way it's happening here is _making your skin crawl_.

"…okay," you finally manage, because at least he's not trying to subjugglate you for sleeping all over his moirail before he did. It's one of the few small mercies the universe has ever given you.

"I ain't gonna get my paint on with you, bro." Gamzee chuckles. His voice is already lower than yours or Karkat's, the bigger chitinous windtube of a highblood letting the sound echo around. "If I were a motherfucker given to being jealous over a little bit of jamming in the pile, I'd have fallen pale for the worst motherfucker in the universe. Shooshes people like some kind of fuckin' miracle. 'sides, I'm pretty sure your diamond's still got our righteous red timesister's name all over it. Wouldn't have a thing to worry about anyway."

The mention of Aradia hurts, hurts as much as any of your physical injuries do. _She'd chosen to leave you here_. She's god-tier, not dead; she could have decided to stay with you instead of consummating her status as death's number one fangirl. Then again, it's been nearly half a sweep since you were _really_ moirails, first she was dead-- and no, _no_ , you can't phrase it like that, first _you killed her_ no matter what Karkat or Terezi or anyone else has to say about your culpability in the matter. First you killed her, and then she was a ghost who didn't seem to feel anything or care about anyone, and then she was a robot who only seemed to care about Equius when she felt anything at all. And now, just when you thought you'd have her back, she's gone again; making friends with the dead is more important to her than whatever shambles of your moirallegiance you've been clinging to.

"That doesn't matter." Your voice shakes when it comes out, and you're not sure whether it's the fact you've just realized your moirallegiance was dead long before Aradia had done the next best thing to formally ending it or that you're still _horrified_ by what Gamzee is getting up to in the pile that you're pretty sure was _explicitly made for you_. It shouldn't remind you of climbing into the recuperacoon in Aradia's hiveblock, of settling in next to her and letting her hair float around both of you almost as much as the sopor had. "I'm pretty sure leaving me when I'm the most pitiful troll left alive means she really doesn't have those kinds of feelings for me anymore."

"I dunno about that, bro." There's a faint rustling sound, like cloth being pushed aside, and Karkat trills a little in his sleep. What the fuck is Gamzee _doing?_ "The way I see it, we all gotta make sacrifices for this fucked-up story we got put in, you get it? I bet your palesister leaving you there was the hardest thing she ever did, because there ain't no way she don't have some god shit and time shit to take care of instead of partying it up in some dreambubbles."

The heaviness under your bloodpusher has to be blood and swelling in your air sacs, capillaries burst with the forces you'd commanded with no regard for what your frail goldblood body could handle; there's no good scientific reason why the thought of Aradia being as distraught as you are should cause a physical ache in you.

"I think I'd rather have her dump me, though," you find yourself saying, all that misery spilling over into your words. "I don't want her to feel as horrible as I do right now."

"That's because you're the second-best moirail I ever saw." Gamzee makes a sound low in his throat, and Karkat gives him a sleepy, answering murmur in return. It sounds like something you shouldn't be overhearing in the first place, but it's still nice in a squirming, guilty sort of way; you might be grieving for your own moirail right now, but you still get a secondhand warmth from hearing Gamzee and Karkat in the first flush of a new moirallegiance.

"Mmm," Karkat hums, and the pillow pile shifts. He must be sitting up and stretching. "Gamzee?"

"Right here, best friend," Gamzee assures him; the inflection he gives to the words _best friend_ proving that they're not just best friends. They're _stupid_ pale for each other.

"Shit, _Sollux?_ " There's a sudden panic in Karkat's voice, as if he's just awakened enough to realize they aren't alone. "Are you okay?"

"No," you answer, too tired for anything but honesty now. "I hurt everywhere, AA dumped me, FF is dead, I can't fucking _see_ , I think I damaged myself internally when I threw this entire _asteroid_ across _paradox space_ , and I woke up to GZ getting his pale on with you in your _sleep_. I am in a state exactly opposite of okay right now, KK. How could I be anything _else?_ "

There's another shifting to the pillows, and then Karkat is right up in your face.

"You think you damaged-- _fuck_ , Sollux, how bad are you hurt? I thought you were choking up blood you swallowed when your fangs got knocked out! Were you _actually coughing up blood?_ "

"Yes." You shrink down on yourself and wrap the thermal tarp around your shoulders like you're a shitty hipster with a shitty cape. "And my thorax hurts like I'm going to do it some more."

Last night-- fresh from the loss of the defining relationship of your life and a new infatuation at the same time, sick and exhausted and in so much pain you were ready to die, ready for nothing more for your moirail to pull you away with her and shoosh you right into the afterlife. Things aren't much better now, except that you've just realized _you don't want to die_. You want things to stop hurting, yes, but you also want to get into slapfights with Karkat and to get poked with Terezi's cane and maybe to punch Strider more than a little bit.

"I don't want to die, KK." You reach out to where you think you'll find his arm, and you miss. He gets what you're trying to do, though, and takes your grasping appendage in his.

"I told you, you're not allowed to leave me here with the hulled ground-nut collection." His voice breaks to a chirrup of distress in the middle, but he holds his ground and keeps on talking instead of breaking down completely. "I'll make a new memo about it, if I have to-- the _Sollux Captor Is A Shitty Friend If He Dies On Me, And He's Not Allowed To Do That_ room."

"Your memos are so stupid, KK," you half-sob on him. "Never stop making them, they're the only funny thing I have left in my life."

It's the stupidest thing you've ever said, and you mean every unironic syllable of it.

"My memos are not stupid, and you sound like you can't breathe," Karkat says, his alarm completely subsuming any potential affront at the insult. "Gamzee, get Terezi in here, _fuck_ , I hope she knows what to do. Because _I sure as hell don't_."

"Sure thing, best friend." Gamzee rises with a force that knocks a couple of pillows loose, and leans in close for a second. He's probably dropping one last pet on Karkat's head, or something, before he leaves to find Terezi.

"You're not going to die, you horrible, horrible asshole," Karkat reiterates after Gamzee leaves, and he lays one of his grasping appendages palm-down on your forehead. It's cool against your soft chitinous exoskeleton layer, a small relief against the sparking fever-heat in you. "I'll _fight_."

That brings to mind the sudden, horrible mental picture of Karkat and Aradia slapfighting each other over who gets to keep you. Aradia would insist you're invited to her corpse party and Karkat would start shrieking about how you're the only bastion of sanity left on the asteroid and like hell she's having a stupid corpse party anyway. It's exactly the kind of thing they would have done when you were all half a sweep younger and a lot more stupid, sitting around your hiveblock some evening Aradia didn't have her FLARP game--

You can't help it, you really are crying into Karkat's sweater now. He doesn't shoosh you; instead he lets you keep going, stroking at your back occasionally to let you know that he's still there but not doing anything but _listening_. It's an oddly ashen way to deal with someone's pain, to sit there a silent witness instead of actively comforting them. And you'd bet all the boondollars on this asteroid that Karkat is not in any way, shape, or form ashen for you, but he must know that anything else would just upset you more.

"What's wrong?" Terezi doesn't cackle or shriek or make any jokes when she approaches the pile, which is just as scary as Karkat trying desperately to bargain you into staying alive or Gamzee getting a feelings jam on with you. They're all afraid you're going to die, too.

"Please tell me you know what to do," Karkat says, desperately.

Terezi, as it turns out, does not have the faintest idea of what to do. She also brings Lalonde, Strider, and Kanaya with her, because it's apparently time for the sequel to last night's _watch a desperate pale slut beg for it_ live action porno.

"I don't think you're dying, but you shouldn't move around too much. You could dislodge a blood clot." Terezi has poked her cold, sharp fingers just about everywhere that's decent by the time she declares her (lack of a) diagnosis. "We should get you some water and hot nutrient slurry before you go back to sleep. You'll need that to heal properly."

She's as perfunctory about medicine as she is about the law, and that's actually sort of comforting right now. Even if you're really desperately hoping you _don't_ have some kind of blood clot in there, because you don't have any more of a clue about the proper treatment for that than anyone else here seems to.

It's a cycle: you get drugged, you go back to sleep, you wake up sick and horrible, and you get drugged again. This time when you wake up, though you're clear-headed. Everything still hurts— a hundred different raw places are all torn open and burned and bleeding, all doing their best to protest the fact you've survived at all. Your body does a pretty good job of calling for your doom all on its own, no supernatural powers required, and if this is the kind of misery you're going to have to live with then you kind of want to listen to it.

"I'm sorry," someone— Kanaya, that's Kanaya— says, and brushes your hair back from your face. "I am afraid we cannot sedate you again for the time being; it was starting to make you ill. We are attempting to alchemize a more effective substitute for sopor slime, but it is difficult and we cannot be careless with our grist."

The thought of a recuperacoon is simultaneously comforting and horrifying right now; while floating in a sleepy haze is such a wonderful thought you almost shiver in the anticipation of it, that would mean sopor slime getting in your wounds and probably _burning_ , not to mention what getting it _literally_ inside your thinkpan might do to your brain. It would probably make Gamzee's sopor-addled mind look sharp as one on mind honey.

"How are you feeling?" Kanaya asks, and her breath on your face is warm as death.

"Like I want you to cull me." Maybe she'll bite you again. You'd been downright prescient when you'd guessed before that being okay with everything had been temporary, and ephemeral thing that gives way to the too-familiar weight of your own traitor brain.

"I am afraid I cannot do that." She sits down on the pile next to you, a shockingly pale gesture. 

"Karkat has already made a memorandum promising unending torment to anyone who kills anyone else, and Rose has given it her leaderly approval. As I do not wish to be on the receiving end of what is sure to be a dangerously loud lecture, I will have to abstain."

She puts a hand on your head, soft and hesitant, and when you don't pull away she digs her claws in between your horns. You've never been a touchy-feely type; even with Feferi, you had been more about _talking_ than you had been _touching_.

"Am I so irresistibly pitiful now that you can't keep your hands off me?" You ask her, but can't help pushing your head up into the touch. It _thrums_ through you, the instinctive reaction to being scratched between your horns relaxing the muscles at your temples and in your neck and easing, just a little, the headache that never really goes away.

"Yes," she says in a quiet, embarrassed voice. "But I am honestly not pale for you, not really. You simply look like you could use a friend with benefits right now, as neither of us has a moirail— _oh_ , this is _embarrassing_ , I'm sorry."

You're heartsick and diamondsick and lonely; everything hurts and you feel fuzzy and thirsty. You've never been pale for Kanaya— you could have easily been Karkat's moirail, if Aradia hadn't been there first, and you spent part of the game with a brief, ashamed pale crush on Terezi that had only evaporated after how much more _competent_ than you and utterly not pitiful or in need of a moirail she is became obvious. But Kanaya has not ever crossed your mind in relation to any quadrant before, not even ashen— but that actually makes this _less_ awkward than it would be otherwise, less of a betrayal to someone who doesn't even want you anymore.

"Thank you," is all you have the energy to say, and you press your face to her shoulder and let her stroke your head. You're too dry and wrung-out to cry, but you can feel yourself shaking in a way that would probably be sobbing if you had the moisture in your body right now for tears. She doesn't shoosh you, kiss you, or do anything else crass or overly pale; she just pets you and gives you a place to lose it on in a way that could actually really be platonic, albeit in a modern, quadrant-liberated kind of way. It's unnatural for any troll to be so warm, much less someone higher-blooded than you are, but she feels nice against your skin.

"It's too cold in here for you," she says finally, after you finally stop shaking. "It is making you worse. I myself found it slightly uncomfortable here before my… change, so I cannot imagine it is healthy for you. I suppose that is what we get when we allow Terezi to control the ambient temperature."

That had been a compromise, so that you and Tavros didn't freeze to death but Eridan and Feferi didn't overheat. Maybe you can re-negotiate now that nobody here needs it quite so _cold_ ; Gamzee doesn't _quite_ have icewater for blood.

"The humans are most comfortable at a temperature I believe you would find favorable." Kanaya puts her free arm around your waist, holding you to her. "Rose has offered to let you keep your pile in the sitting room she's put together, at least until you recover somewhat and can better handle the lower temperature."

Then comes the bad news.

"We have been changing the dressings on your face while you were drugged, to spare you the pain. I am afraid it will be necessary to take them off at least this one last time, though if they appear healed enough we may be able to leave you with just your goggles." Kanaya keeps you pinned into place with the unnatural strength of her stupid dead arms, and all your flailing doesn't get you away from her and the torture session that's about to follow. "We still are not sure how I will react if your wounds are open, and Karkat and Terezi are both otherwise occupied. Rose will be taking care of this for you, since she seems a better choice than either Gamzee or Dave."

The truth is that _none_ of them would have let you slip away; Kanaya holds you with brute force, Karkat would scream until you'd forgotten what you were trying to do in the first place, Terezi would just drub you across any available body part when you tried to get past her, Gamzee is... just _no_ , Strider could just go back in time and keep you from leaving, and Lalonde is-- from what you can gather-- completely and totally omniscient.

"Come on, then," Lalonde says out of completely fucking nowhere, and how long has she _been_ there listening? "I would like to get this taken care of as quickly as possible, which I think is something you might also appreciate."

You're finally well enough to walk around, evidently, even if you're weak and off-balance from being on pile-rest for so long. Terezi hasn't swooped down out of the sky to berate you and drag you back to the pile with promises of so many drubbings the second you're well enough to take them, at any rate, which has to mean something. You hang on to Lalonde's proffered arm just because you're not used to navigating without your eyes yet, especially not when two new people on the asteroid probably means new treasure chests and new piles of stuff and all kinds of other new things to potentially trip over and knock the rest of your teeth out with. At least it's not far to the nearest ablution block.

Given her lack of claws and surfeit of manual dexterity, you have to wonder why giving her this job hasn't occurred to anyone before; she doesn't scratch when she takes hold of the bandages and starts to unwrap them, which is such a miracle (and fuck Gamzee, you can use that word when something honestly qualifies) you almost can't believe it.

"Do you want to talk about what's happened? I'm given to understand that it was worse for you than it was for anyone else." The question comes out of absolutely fucking nowhere; you’re gaping at her audacity, which seems to clue her in to just how culturally insensitive it was. "I am not proposing a feelings jam with you, as the others would call it. Humans often find it cathartic to share their thoughts and troubles with an impartial third party whose job is to help them work through their issues. I was merely offering myself as a sounding board, should you desire such an outlet for your emotions."

The lengths humans go to in order to fulfill their emotional needs in a society without quadrants will never stop being stupid-- professional substitutes for moirails, _really?_ Pale prostitution isn't really rare, since there's no chance of getting culled for not filling your conciliatory quadrants, but it sounds like it's actually _normative_ to the humans. Lalonde sees nothing wrong with propositioning you for such an arrangement, and you barely _know_ her.

"At any rate, your wounds are healing nicely. I think we can skip washing them again, and leave them to dry out." She is suddenly the best person on the asteroid, bizarre fetish for clinical feelings jams or no, because she isn't going to slough a layer of dead tissue out of your tenderest, most pain-wracked places without an anesthetic. "I do not believe the sopor substitute we've managed to alchemize should get into your eyes, however. No one has attempted to ingest it, for obvious reasons, but I cannot imagine it could be beneficial to directly inject into your brain. Do you still have your goggles?"

"They're not mine," you say, and your mouth is full of ashes. "They're FF's."

"Do you think she would want you to have them?" Lalonde asks, as if she can't see the damn answer for herself. Maybe she's not looking, out of respect for your privacy.

"Probably." She'd switched your glasses and hers once, proclaiming that you looked _glubbing ador--able!_ and that seeing everything in red-and-blue was _so--ooo tentacool!_ It had been one of the stupidest fish puns she had ever made, and you had thought it was cute.

Remembering Feferi doesn't hurt nearly so deeply as thinking about Aradia does-- she had been nice and pretty and dangerous, and you had really, really liked her. You think you could have pitied her more than anyone in the world if you'd only had more _time_ ; you'd spent bare days considering each other as potential matesprits. It hurts like losing a good friend, not like losing a pity-mate-- it's awful and you miss her, but she hasn't left a gaping wound in your bloodpusher the way Aradia has. The sick rush of guilt you get whenever anyone here paps your head or tells you that you're getting better in the small gestures of casual pity you've gotten used to doesn't come when you consider that Karkat appears to have the world's most incompetent flushcrush on you. Trust him to fall headlong into romantic pity for someone just because he loses his sight and ruptures what had felt like seven different organs saving everyone from Jack Noir and the Green Sun.

"Then they _are_ yours now," Lalonde says. She leans forward to take a closer look at your eyes; you can tell because you can feel her breath on your face, warm as Kanaya's and somehow even more menacing in that way peculiar to the two of them. It's an elegant, delicate proclamation of fire and doom. (Sometimes you think you miss the prophecies, at times like this. Then you remember that the ones you'd heard weren't like this; they had been messy things that were haunting for how they ripped you raw, not for how they could have been beautiful.)

"I-- they're in my respiteblock." You're probably not ever going to think of them as _yours_ ; they're borrowed from a girl who had been a good friend, a girl who had laughed all the time but was deadly serious when she told you she wouldn't _eel-ver let them make you a helmsman!_

"Well, you don't need to wear them all the time-- in humans, at least, oxygen is supposed to be important for healing. So I would only recommend wearing them in your recuperacoon." She moves back, away from such close proximity to your face. "I think we're finished, for now."

She doesn't pet you, she doesn't push you to do anything, and she doesn't tell you how much she pities you with the tone of her voice. You're pretty sure the feeling low in your gut is gratitude for that, that she's treating you like she does everyone else.

You still spend most of your time outside the recuperacoon resting, interspersed with visits from the others. Karkat tells you to _get the fuck better, you can't leave me alone with these people_ and snarls and spits until you tell him to stop interrupting your pity sleep with his nonsense, which makes him sputter and yell even more. Terezi comes by to try and teach you to taste the world like she does, but it turns out teaching someone when you can't telepathically impart the instructions is so much harder you privately think you'll never be able to do it. The one time you make this thought heard, it gets you a drubbing right across your knuckles.

"Nobody is going to hit each other with sticks in here," Lalonde says crisply after the cane leaves a stinging stripe across your skin. The clicking that always accompanies her words never stops. "Dave may find it endlessly fascinating when you act like a ravening barbarian, but I do _not_. You may refrain from administering cane drubbings for a few moments of your fantastically violent life, or you may excuse yourself from my parlor."

That just makes Terezi snarly and contrary, which ends the lesson for the day. She leaves with a grumble about how Lady Lavenderlocks is going on trial in Can Town for being a _bluh bluh huge bitch_. You don't even want to know.

Lalonde is still clicking, even though she isn't talking. Maybe it's _not_ part of her voice like you've thought this whole time, after all. You hadn't heard it that time she'd earned her place as your favorite human, so it must not be. Humans are so _strange_ , not even having a tonal quirk to their voices.

"What is that?" You finally ask her; the two-beat rhythm is one of the most comforting things you've heard in a long time. "I thought it was your voice, but now I don't think it is."

"Knitting," Lalonde says. "And before you ask, I believe the troll equivalent would be 'fabric pattern creation via an analog binary needle system with output intended to be worn by sentient beings.' Or something close enough to that to give you an idea."

That… actually does make a surprising amount of sense. And since 'binary' and 'pattern creation' are two things that never fail to light up your programmer's brain, you reach out for the cane— no concealed weapons inside, because you still don't need to waste your time with that nonsense— Terezi had gifted you with when you were first well enough to hobble around a little bit, and stand up.

"That rule against drubbings applies to you, too," Lalonde says. _Clickclickclickclick_ , her analog binary needle apparatus says in counterpoint.

"I just want to see your analog binary pattern creation apparatus in action," you tell her, and fuck, you're _whining_. "The only entertainment I get anymore is KK melting down and TZ drubbing me when I don't lick things enthusiastically enough, and what you're doing actually sounds kind of interesting."

"Very well," she says, and the clicking slows but doesn't stop. "You'll have to come and sit down; it's a very small apparatus."

Knitting, as it turns out, is _fascinating_. It's got a comforting similarity to programming at its most basic level: put raw material in, apply binary-powered engine, and watch useful output come out at the end. You can feel the patterns in the fabric under your fingers, as exact and perfect as anything a machine could put out, and that makes you feel a little bit better about everything.

That fascinated distraction for a new hobby—even one you can only partake in by proxy-- lasts for all of a perigee, until the newest interpersonal disaster decides to show up, introduce itself to everyone, and sit the fuck down in your life and refuse to leave.

" _Hell fucking no_ ," Karkat is yelling at everyone and no one when you feel your way into what used to be the computer room. Tap-tap-tap- _fwoosh_ , you've hit yet another pillow pile. Lalonde and Kanaya are worse with those than Gamzee is with those stupid horns, and you're pretty sure they get up to things Gamzee doesn't even have a quadrant for on some of them. "I am not taking that garbage, it is not _oh yes, let's poison Karkat because dead is better than not sleeping_ day up in here!"

"Stop being such a dramannihilator, _Karkles_. Even I have to admit it's not going to kill you-- it didn't kill Sollux, and he was even suffering from blood loss the first time." Terezi sounds more annoyed than you've heard her since back when her kismessitude that wasn't was still a thing with Vriska.

"Oh my god," is all you can say when you realize what they're talking about. "Are you still not sleeping?"

"Shitty sopor substitute doesn't work right." He sounds petulant, like he's going to do like always does and dig his claws in. Stubborn fucking _crab_.

"Look, we're all really impressed by your dedication to dying from sleep deprivation, and by that I mean just saying that has made today spontaneously transform into opposite day. Take the fucking vodka and chill on that pillow pile you're always making googly eyes at Captor from so the rest of us can have a couple of quiet hours before your next thousand hour speed bender, or however it is you stay the fuck awake." It's _Strider_ , of all people. "And speak of the devil and he shall appear, your-- no, never mind, neither one of you is the better half. You're both the fucking worst half. Captor, make him take a shot of metalloid moonshine and put on _Titanic_ or some shit so he can cry all this out, because I am _done_."

You are honestly _sorry_ you can't see what's going on in front of you for the first time since this happened-- oh, you've been sad, upset, and angry, but never really _sorry_. But right now you would give mad caegars to see exactly what's going on in front of you. It _sounds_ like Terezi is drubbing Karkat and Strider is possibly holding him down (and if they think their blackrom is some kind of secret, well, someone should probably clue them in that it's sure as hell not) and you aren't really sure _which_ one of them is dosing him with the liquor. You just know that it's happened, because pretty soon Karkat has stopped yelling at everything and started acting like, as Strider had so disgustingly put it, he was making googly eyes at you.

Karkat has settled in next to you in the absurdly squishy pile, a surprisingly cool weight against your side. Everyone's just sort of assumed he's a rust blood who's been hiding it for as long as he can so as to have _some_ semblance of deniability for the highbloods who had barely tolerated his leadership as it was, but now that you're up close and personal with him you're not so sure that's true. No, scratch that, you are absolutely sure it's not true, because he would feel warm to the touch if that were the case. He feels, well... _cool_ isn't quite the word you're looking for. _Tepid_ , maybe, like water just cool enough to be unpleasant to bathe in but just warm enough to be unpleasant to drink. He has to be higher on the hemospectrum than you, but not by much.

It actually feels nicer than your stupid mental metaphor makes it sound, since the ambient temperature in here is actually a little bit high for you. It's the kind of warmth Aradia would have liked in her hiveblock, and that feeling is a little bit less painful with Karkat a mess of an entirely different sort of pity--

\--oh hell, he really _is_. He's as stupid high as you'd been that first night, which means he's not even _trying_ to hide his flush. He even _chirps_ at you when you pull the thermal tarp aside (it's way too warm in here right now to need it), a clean, affectionate little sound that speaks entire volumes' worth of pity.

"You are so high right now, KK," you tell him with a sigh. It's not that you've never considered the possibility of a red quadrant with him before-- back when you'd realize the two of you were a callous disregard for Aradia away from having an undeclared moirallegiance, you'd considered flipping it rather than keeping it strictly friendship. Now that you're both older and he's a pitiful disaster and you're a declared catastrophe of pathetic and he's realized Terezi's cane drubbings are entirely platonic now that the Knight of Douchebaggery has touched down on the asteroid, maybe it's something to think about.

"Not as high as you were, with your _bzzzzzz_." He can't really make the same sound you had, and his rasping attempt at it is ridiculous.

"Funny, I wasn't crawling all over you for adulterous pale touching when they drugged _me_ ," you tell him, and he _headbutts_ you. Horns right to the chest, even if it lacks any kind of force. That pretty well clinches the fact that this _isn't_ pale, because that's ridiculously red.

"Not pale," Karkat grumbles, as if it's necessary after that blatant display of flushed horn-touching, and settles back down against you. "Thought I was being obvious."

"You're seriously so high you don't know what you're doing." You know that because you know how it fucked _you_ up the first time; you'd been practically _giggling_ from it, dissociated from how painful everything was and floating on the haze of it. And yeah, this is something Karkat wants-- you've seen perigees of his badly-hidden crush on you since you threw this piece of rock between universes, and considered reciprocating it for a little while now. Even without that, you doubt being high would trip flushed pheromones like that (oh hell, he smells good right now) without some kind of underlying attraction. But you remember how little control you'd had over anything you did, and maybe this is something he'll regret when he sobers up. "I'll make out with you when you're sober."

That doesn't dissuade him from _trying_ , wrapping around you like some kind of undersea inkbeast and digging his horns in under your chin just hard enough to feel _really_ nice. He falls asleep like that, as if he's afraid you'll leave if he doesn't lock all his limbs around yours to keep you where you are. Unfortunately for him, his drunk brain seems to have forgotten that you have telekinesis; it's not hard to hold his limbs in place while you slip away. It's not that you don't want to stay-- it's that you don't want to wake up tomorrow with him looking horrified and asking frantically if you're still friends, and that means putting on Feferi's goggles and climbing into your recuperacoon for the night.

You wake up with your bulge wrapped around your hand and a soft, inviting matesprit trill in your throat. This is just another culling fork of Troll Damocles finally falling on your head, because you're a lowblood and after so many years of selection for it low-blooded trolls are built to pail brutally early and almost as brutally often. Aradia had already been hitting things in frustration by the time she'd died, and you're fairly certain Tavros's sudden bravery in the face of Vriska had been caused by the same. Now it's your turn; whether it was the near-death experience telling your genes they need to propagate _right the hell now_ , spending so much time in a pile with a chirruping bundle of sleepy, pitiful noises and flushed pheromones, or just nature finally deciding that it's time, your body is ready to start hoarding genetic material for the first encounter with the drones your base instincts are still sure you'll have.

You lean your forehead against the keratinized inner shell of your recuperacoon and groan. This is going to be the longest couple of perigees of your _life_.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a lot of porn, almost as much shameless pale snuggling, and a dash of ashen dirty talk (because Dave Strider is positively indecent), as well as scandalous polymoirallegiance, ironic knitting, and a surfeit of feelings.
> 
> (I cannot get AO3 to mark this as complete, but it is.)

You sit down in front of your computer for the first time since it happened, mostly because you're simultaneously sober enough to work the keyboard and not in too much pain to sit up in a chair for the first time since it happened. You've got your headset on, and it's set up to accept voice commands and read the text to you-- not that you figure you're going to need the voice _commands_ , since you haven't actually looked at your keyboard to type since you were three and a half sweeps old and just learning ~ATH. It's the voice _feedback_ you'll need, since for all that Terezi's tried to teach you her weird way of seeing things you can't taste anything but glass and the faintest tinge of honey when you lick your screen. 

_Honey. Fuck._

Listening to Terezi is officially always a bad idea now, because you've just licked the mind honey. You can feel it, your bloodpusher kicking up into overdrive and everything getting sharper and clearer around you. Mind honey is, well-- not a hallucinogen, precisely. You had already been climbing to a manic peak when you'd been forced to eat it before; now that you're not anywhere near that, a tiny trace of it half-dried and rapidly losing potency for it just makes the world move a little bit faster around you. Sounds are louder, smells are sharper-- you almost think that this might help you learn a little better from Terezi, just because of that. (You're not going to do that. Regardless of the different effect now, _you do not eat the mind honey_. You'll run into walls walking everywhere before you'll get hooked on that shit.)

At least it's not enough honey to make your brain go into overdrive and slaughter every living thing on the asteroid, not without the voices telling you who's about to die and beating your brain with their metaphorical fists until it's one aching pulp and you can't hold onto your powers anymore. Actually-- and you cannot believe you're thinking this, it's practically blasphemy against everything you've ever been told-- it's kind of pleasant in such a tiny dose; it magnifies everything, from the sound of your keystrokes to the vibration that runs through the mainframe whenever you compile something. _Command accepted_ is one vibration pattern, _unknown syntax error_ is a much angrier one, and _input superuser password to continue_ makes them go shithive maggots because unlike you, they respect and fear root privileges. 

"Thanks for the lecture, KK," you mutter in their general direction, and your headset sasses you back with _unknown syntax error_ because it thinks you were giving it a voice command. Until it's not on your head anymore; now it's in pieces on the floor, the first and hopefully only casualty of your miniature mind honey rampage.

You change your command, and with every keystroke you correct the bees get a little bit less audibly angry. They sound downright docile by the time you get a _command accepted, welcome administrator SOLLUX CAPTOR_ from your speakers for your trouble. Their contented buzz thrums through your keyboard hard enough to vibrate against your claws like a purr, telling you as surely as the synthetic voice that you've done this correctly. If you can figure out how to read them properly, the bees will make a better feedback system than the voice accessibility; if nothing else, it can tell you immediately if you've mistyped something (rare, but it happens once a perigee or so) rather than having to wait for the command to execute and error out before you'd have to delete and redo the entire thing because there would be no good way to find the bad bit of code.

For the first time since you'd thrown the asteroid, you feel like maybe you're doing something _useful_. You're not just sitting around in the pile getting petted and pitied by anyone who walks by you; you're actually figuring out what the hell you're going to do from now on. Maybe soon you'll be good enough to get the network back in order (it's got to be in shambles right now, because you know what happens when Karkat attempts server upkeep and you can't imagine the humans have had much time for it). Now if only your _personal_ life would resolve itself so neatly. Karkat's been pretending the whole drunken flush confession thing never happened, and between that and your genetic imperative to contribute to the hypothetical future of trollkind waking the fuck up you're not sure whether you want to kiss him or _fling him right off the asteroid_.

" _Hide me_ ," Karkat hisses from the direction of the door, and you have to wonder whether your doom voices haven't taken on some entirely new prophetic iteration. That would actually be a legitimately useful power here, knowing where and when your crippling personal problems are going to show up because you'll think about them first. Either that, you you've somehow managed to summon him by thinking, which would be a really shitty power. Especially since he still smells stupid flushed for you, which would be distracting even _without_ your senses jumped up on mind honey.

"What the hell?" You yank your headphones off-- with your hands and not your psionics, so they end up on your desk and not shattered on the floor. You spin your chair around out of pure reflex, since it's not like it makes any difference to the conversation when you can't see his face.

 

"Kanaya and Gamzee," he says, and you've had enough misery in the past few perigees to recognize it heavy and sour in his voice. "I swear they're doing their best to make me flip ashen for both of them."

So that's it, then-- his terrifyingly inappropriate relationship drama with Gamzee and Kanaya, which at the best of times seems condensed into some giant double moirallegiance ashen reacharound wherein Karkat is mediating between the two of them by shooshing both of them, is why he's here. He's still not going to talk about your own stupid quadrant-confused relationship mess, unless you make him.

You're going to make him if you have to write _sudo pkill -kk_ yelling on his forehead to do it.

"KK, if you're out to pick up yet another moirail for whatever drama you and KN and GZ have then _get out of here right now_ ," you say miserably, because you cannot handle this. Between pretending his stupid drugged confession hadn't happened and the fact he seems to flip red to pale back to red twice a perigee you _just can't handle it_. Sure, everything they schoolfeed you says that _young trolls should expect their quadrants to come and go, and to flip themselves. The flushed-pale and flushed-caliginous axes in particular are given to swapping themselves several times, even in a steady relationship. Your quadrants will not steady themselves until you are anywhere from seven sweeps (for maroon bloods) to twelve sweeps (for seadwellers)_ , but they don't tell you how hard that actually is.

"Another— oh fuck, I literally cannot believe you are this stupid." Karkat punches something— the wall, probably, because it vibrates and that agitates the bees and makes your processor fans kick on. "For somebody who's the craziest apeshit bananas programmer in this entire universe, you have _literally no functioning brain cells inside of your thinkpan_. I am so fucking flushed for you that my skull almost falls off from pity every time I see your stupid face. And of _course_ you think I want you to be my moirail because you've already gone through two matesprits, one of them died and the other one dumped you for corpses and horrorterrors so why would you be trying again— what the ever-loving _fuck_ are you doing?"

You've been pushing your chair forward the whole time he's been ranting, and now he's caught you getting one foot right behind his knee for leverage.

"Requiting your flushcrush, you epic failure," you tell him, and finish hooking your leg around his knees to pull him into your chair with you. It's not hard; he weighs less than some of your smaller apicultures. "Trying to shoosh the entire universe so hard is so pathetic I keep thinking it has to be some kind of _joke_. Especially since you can't even recognize moirallegiance in other people when it's not some stupid movie plot, because AA and I were _pale_ for each other. And I don't want to talk about her right now, okay?"

You have to wonder how Karkat could be so stupid as to think you were enough of a stud to juggle two flushed crushes at once. _Three_ , if you count this stupid weird thing you have for him now.

"…yeah, okay." The weirdest part is that you know he _understands_ , even though he hasn't lost anyone in his quadrants unless you count the weird, improbably red flirtation he'd had going with Terezi for awhile. Not that it had gone anywhere, except straight into other people's red quadrants. "Sorry. That was pretty horrible, even for me." His hands settle on your shoulders, claws catching in the thin fabric of your shirt.

"If the word _shoosh_ comes out of your facegash, I'm going to tip this chair over," you whisper into the shell of his auricular canal in your best attempt at a sexy voice. Evidently it's not as good as you'd hoped, because Karkat _laughs_.

"Oh, yeah, keep talking dirty like that. I don't know how I kept my bulge away from you for so long." You know Karkat has to be making that _face_ , the one where he rolls his ocular bulbs up so he's looking upwards disdainfully; it's the same face he always makes when he sounds deadpan like that. You _hate_ that stupid face.

So you shift your weight and tip the chair over.

" _What the fuck, Sollux_ ," he gasps out against the side of your face, the breath knocked right out of him from hitting the floor under your weight. "In what fucked-up universe was that some kind of _shooshing?_ "

It's completely unfair that his thin, winded voice is _sexy_ pitiful, the kind that twists around inside of you until it finally ties itself into a knot a _lot_ lower than your bloodpusher. Maybe it's the faint rasp behind his words, air scraping past the chitin lattice inside his windtube with a friction you can _hear_ ; maybe it's the fact you can feel him heaving to push air back into his body. It's like a test: do you want to push down and feel him try and fail to breathe, or do you want to just _listen_ , to feel him catch his breath all through your own chest? Are you more black for the stupid annoying things he does, or are you more red for everything else?

It's not even a difficult question. You lay your head down on his chest and listen, feeling it in your skin and your horns when he takes in a rattling breath against all the resistance his empty air-sacs are putting up. 

"I didn't say I wouldn't knock it over if you _didn't_ shoosh me." You nibble at the soft skin just over his collar, barely a pinprick of teeth. It's easier to control now that you've got fewer teeth to worry about, no oversized set of extra fangs hanging over your lower lip and getting in the way anymore. You can feel a hundred little motions all through him: his breath finally filling his chest in one long, relieved rush, his claws snagging in the back of your shirt but staying clear of your skin, the vibration that starts deep in his throat as he lets out a sound that's trying to be a growl but is more like a weird, halfassed purr.

"So what is this?" He asks, and you press your forehead down against his.

"Well, KK, I'm pretty sure I'm trying to make out with you." You smile when he growls a small, disgruntled noise that's way more pitiful than it is threatening.

"I _know_ that, douchelord, and you _know_ I fucking know that. I meant-- what _is_ this?" He doesn't move-- from his posture, he's just _looking at you_ , until he realizes staring romantically into your eyes isn't really effective when you _don't have any eyes_ \-- until he reaches up and paps you on the face. He leaves his hand there, light on the hot flush of your cheek.

"We're on the floor making out and you want to talk about your _feelings?_ " Admittedly, that's a pretty Karkat thing to do, and you probably should have expected a flushed feelings jam before your teeth got anywhere near his skin. Still, _wow_ you sound whiny when you ask him that.

"I most certainly fucking do, because some people are not emotionally stunted nerds who think with their bulges." For being someone who ostensibly isn't an emotionally stunted nerd thinking with his bulge, Karkat seems _awfully_ fond of licking the pheromone-sweetness off your skin.

"KK, I have had the _worst goddamn half a sweep ever_. I died, came back, and almost died again, FF died, AA died, came back, died, came back, and _then_ dumped me, we got stuck on this asteroid, I can't _see_ , I almost died _yet again_ sending this rock into paradox space, my stupid pailing instincts have taken my long succession of near-death experiences as an imperative to get my genetics into the nonexistent slurry, and now you want to interrogate me about my feelings in some kind of stupid pale-flushed reacharound? What this _is_ is me wanting to make out with you because you're cute and flushed and almost as pathetic as I am right now."

If he thinks you're declaring undying matespritship at seven sweeps old, he is both stupid and confusing you with Kanaya.

" _Fine_ ," he huffs against your skin. "This was a stupid idea, anyway. I don't know what I was thinking."

"Oh, for fuck's _sake_." You drop your forehead to _thunk_ down against his thoracic bone ridges, so that your horns brush against either side of his chin. "Making out right now is not a stupid idea. It's a great idea. I just _have no idea whether or not I want to declare undying flush for you_ , and I'm pretty sure that's okay when we're _seven sweeps old_."

"Right, that's me, ruining everything with my emotional inadequacy like the goddamn fool I always am." He starts to squirm under you like he's going to try and roll you off him, and when he opens his mouth to spit out more bile about himself and his future self and especially his past self you press your mouth down onto his to _stop_ it.

It's like kissing him flips some switch; the tension starts to ebb from him, little by little, and while he's still squirming under you it's the kind that means exactly the _opposite_ of wanting to get away. His teeth prick at your lip (he doesn't have fangs so much as he does a row of evenly-pointed little teeth you'd always sort of envied compared to your double set of snaggly fangs) and then he's licking at you, getting the makeout to sloppy territory almost before it starts. Not that you're complaining about that, or about him throwing his weight over with a sudden purpose so you both end up rolling over and he's on top of you. In fact, you are whatever the opposite of complaining is; you can taste your own flush in his mouth, and that shouldn't be as dizzyingly _hot_ as it is.

He purrs when you reach up under his sweater and trace over his grubleg scars, claws scraping ever so slightly against the sensitive skin there until his purling, contented growl vibrates all through you. His own claws are prickling into your hips—it’s him holding onto you that makes you realize you’ve been hitching them up, your bulge practically squirming its way right out of your clothes of its own accord. Fuck, your face must be bright yellow right now; accidentally unsheathing yourself like that is on the top five most embarrassing things you can imagine happening while making out. He stops kissing you and lifts his face up from yours, and you’re sure he’s going to say something stupid, that he’s going to _leave_.

“You weren’t lying about pailing instincts, were you.” He presses his forehead down onto yours, so close you can feel the echo of his voice thrumming in your horns. What he’s not doing is freaking out on you at all; in fact, one of his hands stays firm on your hip and the other slides over to rest on the sawtoothed clothing fastener of your pants. “I don’t really want to pail yet. I mean—fuck, that came out wrong. I do want to, but I _can’t_ yet, okay? But I could help you. If you want.”

“You don’t sound like you want to.” You bite your lip at how petulant that comes out; who the hell do you think you are, getting upset because someone might not want to touch you? You’re the worst. It’s you.

“Look, it’s _humiliating_ that I’ve got you here and we’re making out and it’s awesome but I can’t actually do anything else, okay?” His words come out in one angry rush of air, a run-on sentence you can _hear_ the lack of punctuation in. “I feel like shit, because this is probably making you feel worse.”

“ _You_ feel like shit?” You can’t help but laugh, a hysterical, bubbling buzz whining its way up out of your windtube. “I’m the one who can’t even keep his bulge inside for five minutes. That’s not your fault.”

“Oh my god, we’re both such stupid assholes.” He stops talking and kisses you instead, and he uses your dizzied moment of shock—Karkat, actually _kissing you to shut you up about feelings_ —to yank down the sawtooth fastener and carefully slip his hand inside your clothes. 

Your bulge isn’t so fond of his caution, and it wraps around his fingers so enthusiastically you’re almost afraid his claws are going to catch on the thin, delicate skin. You’re making the stupidest noises into his mouth and you don’t even care, because this is amazing. If there’s an intergalactic award for bulge-touching, everyone else can go home: it now belongs to Karkat Vantas. You’re twisting around him, winding between his knuckles and up his wrist until you can’t figure out where your bulge stops and his hand starts. And somehow even the temporary half-relief you get when you shudder under his hand (in no time at all, it seems like) is more satisfying than it is when you’re touching yourself in your recuperacoon.

“How do you feel?” Karkat asks while you’re catching your breath.

“Like I want to cut you open and curl up inside,” you tell him. Pheromones and hormones and instincts are all making you stupid, millions of years of evolution conspiring to take away all your conscious brainpower. He smiles against your skin.

“If you’d said that in the _first_ place when I asked, I wouldn’t have freaked out like that.” He loosens his hand as your bulge starts to untwine itself and retract; it’s still half-awake and squirming a little even when you’ve got it all the way inside, because your aching genetic material gland is still telling it to stand at attention and get another troll inside of your nook as soon as possible.

“You would have found _something_ to fly off the handle about.” You let yourself relax into a boneless puddle of troll, all melted chitin and temporary satiety, and you hook a leg around his waist to keep him there. “Now shut up, I _know_ this has to be your favorite part.”

As it turns out, you’re right; cuddling _is_ Karkat’s favorite part, even if you’re doing it tangled up on the floor. You aren’t going to regret a second of the inevitable sore back this is going to give you, not with Karkat’s claws tracing the lines of your own grubleg scars like you’d done for him earlier and a deeper, more contented purr than you’re used to hearing from him rumbling through both of you.

That honeymoon doesn’t last long. The entire asteroid has basically turned into one giant relationship mess that not even _Karkat_ can think is acceptable, because he's not insane. _Yet_. Yet is an important word to append to that, because sometimes he sounds like he's inching closer every day to snapping under the weight of keeping everyone _else_ functional. It doesn't help that Gamzee keeps disappearing to somewhere _Lalonde can't see_ , which makes Karkat flip paler for Kanaya until the inevitable moment when Gamzee comes back and he's wracked with guilt for being a horrible, awful person. Which means that you, by default, get to listen to all of his inadequacies regarding this precisely because you're _not_ in his pale quadrant. You shut him up with kissing a lot, because you're not his moirail. You're wired to want to throw him over your shoulder and take him back to your hive when he's in trouble, not to want to talk him through it. _That's_ the difference between the two quadrants he can't seem to get right, not anything to do with pailing-- especially since you still haven't gotten any closer to that than hands on bulges, and it's still driving you shithive insane.

"--and my feelings are completely inappropriate," Kanaya is saying when you enter the communal recreation block in hopes of finding _something_ to distract yourself from everyone’s horrible relationship problems. Evidently the universe hates you, since from the sound of it you’ve just walked into another one. "Especially as it will seem to be an extension of my enmity for his moirail, which is not true."

"Have you discussed this with him?" Lalonde asks her. "Since you are so adamant that you cannot such discuss such things with me without flipping our quadrant, I can only suggest that you do so."

"Girl, I'm about ready to get between you and the juggalo," Strider says. What is this, some kind of bizarre polyamorous inter-quadrant feelings jam with added human incest? "I'm sick of Rose and the fruity rumpus asshole king both swandiving off the handle when the two of you are in the same room."

"I do not _swandive_ off any room furnishings, Dave." Lalonde has that warning tone to her voice that means something decidedly unpleasant is going to happen unless the conversation rapidly changes direction in the next few words. You know, the tone that means absolutely nothing at all to Strider because he has no survival instinct.

"You so do, and I'm _serious_. I'm an American white boy with no real role models and a taste for shitty rap, so I'm a few degrees of latitude removed from being at-risk for juggalodom myself. I know how to handle him." Strider pushes his chair out from the table-- you can hear the scrape against the un-carpeted part of the floor-- and stands up. "We are going to lay down some laws, T-Py style, and if either of you break them I'm gonna borrow her cane and drub the shit out of both of you. She'll let me, too, because at the risk of giving you too much information because I seriously don't fucking care at this point, tasting me drubbing lawbreakers with her cane will probably turn her crank in _every conceivable way_."

"You are a disgusting human being, Dave." Lalonde sounds less than thrilled, even though she has some moments of being a disgusting human (you're not sure how many of those are related to being a human and how many of them are unique to Lalonde and Strider, though) herself. "I am going to leave this horrifying conversation before it gets any further, though I certainly encourage you in your endeavor to terrorize them out of hating each other. I don't suppose you'd mind conversing with me elsewhere, Sollux?"

"--dude, when did you get here?" Strider asks. "Since when are you capable of juggalo-level ninja shit, anyway?"

"I was tapping my cane the whole way in, idiot," you tell him. "You were just so busy coming up with stupid plans and stupid names for TZ that you didn't hear me. Let's go, LL."

"Thank you for that rescue," she says when you're both in the hallway. "I apologize if you had anything pressing to do in there. I just-- I'm tired of them all _arguing_."

"I didn't realize he was waxing _ashen for them_." You really hadn't; sure, it's been kind of obvious that Kanaya and Gamzee are having some kind of terrifying monster killer contest, but it hadn't seemed romantic. _Terezi_ and Gamzee, now, that was a blackrom you could see happening.

"Dave is-- well, he _can_ handle people, when he wants to. It's just that he generally finds it more amusing to goad them until they snap, like he did with Karkat." She starts walking without so much as a by-your-leave, which leaves you the choice of either letting go or strutting down the hall arm in arm like a couple of bluebloods on promenade.

You make a shitty blueblood, incidentally, since you're pretty sure they aren't supposed to be skinny, gangly, and blind. She doesn't seem to care that you're the opposite of elegant or fancy, though.

"As long as he doesn't make GZ snap again." Your stupid caliginous crush on him had entirely evaporated the second Karkat had cuddled the murderous rampage right out of him; the flip your digestive sac does at the thought of him stalking the hallways again is purely platonic.

"If he does, he and Kanaya are more than capable of containing Gamzee long enough for Karkat to talk him down again." She can see everything, of fucking _course_. Why even talk to her about things like this? It would have been like someone coming up to the old you and asking _I'm going to die, right?_ , because of fucking course it's true and you know about it. "But I doubt it will come to that. We have all told him how imperative it is he _not antagonize Gamzee_. I believe Karkat drew him a diagram."

You're in the alchemeiter room; you can tell by the way your footsteps echo on the metal floor. It's cavernous at best and downright ominous at worst, like someone took the worst parts of Lalonde's grimdark knowledge and your doom voices and _made them into a room_. But it's got the alchemeiter and Rose's particular pillow pile, and nobody else really goes there unless they're specifically looking to alchemize something with Strider and Terezi's ill-gotten grist supply. When you stop, she's rearranging things in her sylladex so she can take out her needles, swapping items around into proper pairs on the tree. It's the most beautiful thing you've ever heard, the click as matched sets slide into place together.

"I would have killed someone for that fetch modus a sweep ago," you tell Lalonde (sure, you could call her _Rose_ like everyone else does, but that doesn't have the same ring to it and doesn't shorten nicely to LL besides), when you realize what she's using for a fetch modus. Why hasn't anyone on Alternia invented something so simple and completely awesome as a binary tree modus? Why didn't you invent it, stupid? "You are the best human."

"That isn't hard when my competition, as much as I love them all, consists of Dave Strider, the Prank Master, and the girl who turned herself into half a dog." She sounds flattered despite herself, though. "I must admit, I find you one of the more engaging trolls, after Kanaya. You largely lack the personality flaws of the others, though Kanaya tells me that this is only the case because I met you _after_ your near-death experience."

"Yeah, knowing who's going to live and who's going to die makes you an asshole," you agree readily. "Even _I_ think I'm more fun now. Pretty sure the only one who's upset is TZ, and that's just because I'm not appleberry blast or whatever, anymore."

" _Sollux_ ," Karkat says from out of fucking nowhere. Is being a ninjarauder contagious on this asteroid, or something? Did he catch it from Gamzee? "I need to talk to you. Outside. _Now_."

You let him drag you out of the room, because it's the path of least resistance as compared to starting a shouting match with him.

"The _fuck_ ," Karkat says, in the long-suffering voice of someone who has just discovered his matesprit has bizarre romantic proclivities— which is because this is exactly the situation he's in right now. "Do you have some kind of uncontrollable urge to shove any purple woman with a squid fetish you meet into your empty quadrants?"

"Shut up, you idiot," you hiss right back at him, because fuck, you _know_ your stupid rebound palecrush on a human who deadpans in the face of Karkat's best rage fits and has the most perfectly-crafted sylladex you've ever seen (or rather, ever heard or felt, given that you've never actually _seen_ it) and whose well-balanced name shortens down to LL is just that: a stupid rebound palecrush because she reminds you of so many of your favorite things. But then again— not your favorite people, you suddenly realize. You _don't_ have a crush on her because she reminds you of someone else, because she isn't a damn thing like Aradia at all.

It's a revelation rather uncomfortably like having a conversation about romance with Karkat, except that one half of your own brain is interrogating the other half to get there. She's not anything like Feferi, either, except for the whole purple ladies of an eldritch cephalopod persuasion thing that Karkat has so helpfully hung a light source dampener on. Or anything like Karkat, for that matter, which is good because quite frankly you don't think you could handle two of him. Even if the thought is just a little bit interesting because, well, _two_.

"Oh, my— it's _not even that_ , is it? You actually _like_ her tentacle fetish and her boner for elegant coding, and the more of these words that come out of my mouth about this the less surprised I actually am about any of it. _You are not exempt from the no interspecies makeouts rule, Sollux Captor_. I don't care how many times Terezi says it's an unjust law that she is civilly disobeying out of cultural sensitivity to human traditions. So you can just stop looking at Lalonde with those sad, empty sockets that just scream how much you want her grasping appendages all over your face, because _no_."

He stops to take a breath, because even Karkat has to breathe _sometime_. This is unfortunate, because in that pause to shove more air down his windtube he realizes you're wearing a scarf; you can tell, because his flailing little hands reach out and take hold of the ends. "Oh, fuck, _where did you get that?_ She knitted that, didn't she! This has already gone too far— as if we need to have another scarf-wearing asshole around here! It must be a rule, that we have to have one on this shitty asteroid all the fucking time! Hey, maybe soon we'll have enough scarves I can _hang_ myself with a tasteless rope of pure hipster magic!" 

You're about to tell him that it's completely fucking obvious he's got some kind of blackrom going on with Strider and it _has_ been obvious since oh, about a perigee after you woke up from your induced almost-coma when someone shushes him for you.

"Shhh, bro," Gamzee says from somewhere behind you, having appeared there out of nowhere and without a sound to herald his arrival. He's like some kind of terrifying ninjarauder, which is quite frankly something the universe should have never allowed to happen in a subjugglator ever. "Calm yourself the fuck down, best friend, or I'm not gonna be able to keep my hands off your pitiful, tantrum-throwing self."

"Oh, fuck you, you shambling nonsensical horror, like you wouldn't be all over Strider's bulge if I didn't make you follow the rules like a good troll—" and then his yelling abruptly cuts off, replaced with a muffled attempt at a shout, and Gamzee is making a weird, rumbling noise until the volume goes down and then quiets entirely. It's probably more of a function of the fact that you never really went outside and socialized with other trolls in person before now than your new attention to everything you hear, but you're only just now noticing the huge range of tones underlying your friends' voices: from Gamzee's rasping to the clockwork whir in Terezi's and the clicking chirrup underlying Karkat's. Only Kanaya and Lalonde seem to have completely smooth voices. Strider's is mostly smooth, too, but he occasionally chirps almost like a red-blooded troll. He and Lalonde claim that's temporary, a stage of human maturation. You think it's fucking hilarious and needs to never stop.

"Shhh, you ain't even right about it," Gamzee croons. You shouldn't be here; this is absolutely filthy even to _listen_ to. But you can't quite bring yourself to leave, mostly because Gamzee is between you and the door and hitting him with your cane trying to find your way would not be a good idea. "No humans anywhere up in my quadrants, bro, you're my whole motherfucking diamond and then some, and you know I've got a righteous dragon lady all up in my business all the time and two steps away from running right onto my spade. Besides, you're the one with the human in that quadrant, and I ain't about to wreck that for you. That's it, shoosh your poor head about it and relax."

His voices goes lower still, rumbling into a purr like a piece of rusty machinery springing to life again after too many sweeps out of commission. Karkat answers that with a quiet not-quite-chirp, a rough purl out of his throat that's higher than Gamzee's (what isn't?) but a little bit lower than your own. You've even noticed the difference in your own voice, a higher-pitched cousin to the whirr behind Terezi's that comes out a buzzing whine like a very small, very quiet engine.

"I'm going to leave now," you say, loud and careful and so nasal you cringe a little bit at the sound of it. You tap the cane against the floor _very loudly_ as you walk, and you manage to get past their moirallegiance makeout session without running into them or hitting them or anything.

“I see you’ve lost interest in the continuing moirallegiance drama of those three as well,” Lalonde says when you settle back down in the impromptu second lab that’s sprung up around the alchemeiter. “I can hardly blame you for that.”

Kanaya is nowhere to be seen, actually, which is kind of weird because she hadn’t been hanging around Karkat and Gamzee. At least, you’re pretty sure she hadn’t been; she hadn’t been making any noise of she had, and Kanaya isn’t really the type to creep around without making a sound. She’s very polite about making sure you have enough noise to register her presence whenever she’s in the same room as you are, actually, and everyone else could learn a thing or twelve about that from her.

“I believe that my ectobiological brother and his real-life manic pixie dream girl— and I cannot believe I am using a TV Tropes term in real life, honestly— are off with her right now. Dave may or may not be continuing his awful attempt to auspisticize between her and Gamzee, as bizarre and inadvisable as him mediating for anyone, much less someone he so thoroughly traumatized, is to those of us with any sense for the unnatural.” You can hear a faint metallic clicking, which means she’s knitting. “You can sit down, if you’d like. I don’t know why you persist in hovering like that; believe me, if I was affronted at your presence here I would make that fact very much known.”

You’re very careful to tap your steps out with your cane, because people are always leaving shit all over the floor here. It’s even worse than the other lab, despite having fewer people throwing things everywhere and a higher proportion of those people being incredible neat freaks (Lalonde, Karkat, Kanaya), mostly because people keep justifying it to themselves by saying they don’t want to captchalogue anything that they’re going to need to alchemize later and it will be hard to get out and take up too much space. Which is an okay excuse for you (well, okay, not anymore; now it’s Karkat’s excuse to go with your switched modii), since you’d been dealing with a limited buffer. The others can pick up their shit once in awhile; you’d never think that there were two blind people and two diurnal aliens on a nearly-lightless asteroid. or anything like that. Nope, it’s like Karkat, Kanaya, and Gamzee are the only people here and thus everyone has the ability to see what’s under their feet in here.

You manage to get to the pillow pile that’s sprouted up in Lalonde’s knitting corner— because who else is going to watch nobody does anything stupid with the alchemeiter, and actually manage to effectively dissuade them from it?— without falling on your face, though it’s a close call a few times. Why is the one-wheeled device in here? You’re pretty sure that’s what you very nearly trip over, and it’s stupid. 

“I’ve found that allowing Gamzee to leave things where he will is a more effective strategy to keep the peace than arguing with him. Especially if we ever wish to speak with Karkat, seeing as the inverse would mean he would spend all of his time shushing the juggalo.” She drops several soft objects in your lap— balls of yarn, you realize. “So long as you’re here, you might as well be useful. These keep rolling around.”

They're light and soft in your lap, and when you brush your fingers over one you're rewarded with a brief shock like you've just touched your claws to a live wire. This is one of her bizarre yarns, alchemized with wizard paraphernalia to have sketchy magic powers that mostly amount to weird tingly feelings or—- so you've been told by a rapturous Terezi—- change colors periodically.

"You won't want to wear that one," she says, her voice as matter-of-fact as ever. "It's conductive, so I imagine it would ruin your equipment. It was something of a failed experiment in attempting to create a phosphorescent thread, to help spread the burden of lighting the hallways from Kanaya. I think you might be interested in the one I'm working on now, though."

She stops and then she's looping the fabric around your neck; it's warm, not the residual warmth of something that's been in someone's hands but actually actively warm. It's like having Aradia's arm around your shoulders, all her lower-blooded warmth soaking into your skin. Lower-blooded trolls run warmer, it's true, but you also feel it even more keenly when it's cold. Your bodies are used to a hotter ambient temperature than highbloods, their genetic code's direction telling them they're acclimated to the cold sea and its temperature and pressure not so far removed or even still active, in the case of seadwellers. You and Karkat have both been reduced to wracking shivers in temperatures here that don't seem to make Terezi more than slightly uncomfortable and that Gamzee actually finds pleasant. Strider and Lalonde seem immune to the elements in a way that serves as an insidious, constant reminder that you're on an asteroid with a pair of gods incarnate, and Kanaya seems similarly unbothered by fluctuations in temperature. Must be a creature of the morning kind of thing, like something you'd seen in a weird old film where an ancient undead creature would crash down to Alternia in the burned-out remains of a spaceship.

"This is awesome," you tell her with complete sincerity, and she unwinds it from around you.

"You can have it when it's finished," she says. "It's striped. Yellow and black, so I apologize in advance that Dave will never stop cackling about bee videos from internet sites that have long since stopped existing."

"It's okay. I like bees." This is so awkward, and you know she can hear it, too, because her needles don't start clicking again just yet.

"Are you all right?" You're usually pretty sure when Lalonde is asking people how they feel because she is honestly curious and wants them to get better (which is to say, when she asks Kanaya and about half the time when she talks to Dave) and when she's asking out of her own morbid need to analyze people (which is to say, when she asks Karkat, Gamzee, or Terezi, and the other half of the time when she talks to Dave). What you're not sure is which way she means it now.

You stroke the squishy, piezoelectric ball of yarn in your hands, and it's the little jolt you get that spurs you into talking honestly instead of curling up on yourself and letting the rhythmic _click-click_ of the knitting needles lull you into forgetting.

"I don't know," you tell her. "I'm sorry, I'm being really, really awkward, and who do I think I am, KK? I have never been this awkward talking to another sentient being in my entire life, and considering I've been a shut-in computer nerd for that life that says a _lot_. I really like you, okay? I am totally, ridiculously in pale with you and I'm sorry, I thought it was a stupid rebound thing from AA but it's not, I just want to sit in this pile and knit scarves with you and I am so _stupid_ , why would you be interested in someone who's already run off his moirail—"

"The only stupid thing here is the speed at which you are condemning yourself to be, as Dave would so eloquently put it, _foreveralone_." She drapes that delightfully warm scarf over your neck again, and pulls it down so she can knot it. It must be close to done, if it's long enough to tie like that. "Perhaps you should give me time to answer before you decide for me and on the consequences to yourself contained therein."

"I'm sorry, I'm the most awkward thing in two universes," you can't help but babble on, even though the rational part of your brain knows full well that there are, in fact, people more awkward than you are. Which is to say, _Karkat_ ; he's way more awkward than you are right now, even by your most self-loathing standards.

" _Shush_ , you maddening little troglodyte," she finally says, and puts her hand over your mouth. You've never actually seen her in person, but you can tell from her hands that she's probably small, hovering somewhere around Terezi in size. Her hands are warm, like the scarf she's put around you. "I am, in fact, well aware of the heights of awkwardness here, largely due to the dramatic production you are attempting to make out of this. You have more of a need for a therapist than any other troll here barring the one who's already got someone, inept as he may be, and it happens that I am the person here best suited to work through your problems with you. For my part, I find you to be incredibly pleasant company, certainly moreso than anyone else on this asteroid; I would be hard pressed to say who I would rather spend my time with, you or Kanaya, save that I have very different preoccupations with the two of you. In fact, she has already asked me on three different occasions whether you and I have made our pale intentions evident to each other, because they are, and I quote, So Obvious That Karkat Could See Them And Let Us Face It He Is Awful At Seeing Pale Feelings Between Other Trolls Because His Own Are So All Encompassing."

She actually does a really accurate impersonation of Kanaya. It's _uncanny_.

"KK did finally notice," you say, a half-hysterical bit of laughter buzzing up out of you. "He told me that he was going to hang himself with a shitty rope made out of pure hipster magic."

"Yes, well, he also hisses and strokes that bucket John threw at him when he thinks no one is looking, so I am quite comfortable being the object of his derision. But I will not badmouth him further, because I know the two of you are… well, I'm not entirely sure, but you're something." She takes her hand away from your mouth in a meandering path that takes it over your cheek and to where she can tuck your hair behind your auricular sponge cloth's cartilaginous shell. It feels nice enough that you barely manage to suppress a buzzing purr of approval.

Soon enough, the two of you are leaning on each other in the ridiculously ostentatious pillow pile; you can tell just from how it feels that it's pretentious, all tassels and tantalizingly soft fabric that catches at the pads of your fingers but doesn't shred under your claws.

"I do have things I worry about," she says finally, softer than you've ever heard her. Not in volume— Lalonde doesn't speak loudly— but in tone. She doesn't sound like she's judging, for once. "Specifically, what is going to happen when we reach the new session. I've done some research, and it looks… grim."

"Try me, I spent six and a half sweeps hearing prophecies of doom about everyone I know, none of which actually helped me save them." You can't ever be too upset that you can't see, because every time you start to feel that way you remember what it had been like when you _could_ \-- all the voices, always whispering to you about who would live and who would die; it was a never-ending noise hissing through your thinkpan all the time, awake and dreaming and in Prospit and in Derse, facing the horrorterrors and fighting Jack.

Things are better after that, in a lot of different ways. Gamzee still disappears for days or weeks at a time and refuses to say where he’s gone, which distresses both Karkat (who is at least able to cry it out on Kanaya now without starting some kind of horrible quadrant vacillation mess) and Lalonde (who mutters something about void and how it shouldn’t be possible for anyone to enter the new session, and she asks you one day how much you know about his chucklevoodoos—which happens to be nothing). But it doesn’t cause the same problems it did before, now that Strider has somehow managed to stamp out the platonic hatred between Kanaya and Gamzee into a mutual romantic conciliatory hatred for his ironic shenanigans, which in turn makes Karkat less of a nervous wreck.

Karkat being less of a nervous wreck also means that you’ve started talking about moving forward from hands on bulges while making out to honest to god pailing territory.

Actually _pailing_ is a pretty big step, considering that you just admitted to each other a couple of perigees ago that you'd maybe like to try being matesprits. Even taking into account that you've been pretending this hasn't been a thing for awhile before that, you're moving really, really fast. The thing is, though, you're not sure you can help it. You don't have a kismesis and this is the first time your flushed quadrant has gotten this far, but your body doesn't care about that. So far as it's concerned, you're over seven sweeps old and it's _imperative_ you start spilling genetic material all over the place. And nobody else has to deal with this yet, because you're going to be off this stupid rock by the time Terezi or Gamzee feels the same imperative, Kanaya's undead, and fuck if you even know Karkat's blood color. You've given up using size to guess, considering you're freakishly tall and Terezi is freakishly short, and how warm he runs under your hands now doesn't tell you anything except that he's somewhere between yellow and teal. Since he's never shown you any psychic powers— and so far as you know, Vriska's never made him do anything to hurt himself or anyone else— that means he's got to be some kind of greenblood. Which makes sense, because he's physically a little bit stronger than you are but not _blueblood crazy_.

It also means that he still may not _want_ to get concupiscent yet, despite the fact you’re making out all the fucking time now. If he's closer to your blood color he might, but if he's closer to Kanaya's or Terezi's then he's probably got perigees or even a whole sweep until he even starts feeling the same ache that you've had low in your gut almost the entire time you’ve been awake and lucid on the asteroid. By then you'll be going even crazier than you already are, and that says a lot; you can feel the slickness starting to trickle out of you as your bulge starts to swell and unsheathe itself. And that's just at being here in the pile in your respiteblock, on top of him and biting at him affectionately. 

"KK." He's kissing just behind your jaw, the flushed kind that's all tongue and sucking but not much in the way of teeth. It's hard to concentrate on talking while he does that. "Stop for a second and listen, _okay?_ This is _important_ , really important. I'm not going to be able to stop if you go much further, I'm lower-blooded than you are, my stupid body's been ready to start pailing for _perigees_ now. You _know_ that."

"Lower-blooded— what the fuck makes you think that?" Karkat asks, suddenly hissing like he's threatened instead of letting out that nice, purling growl.

"Because it's completely obvious that you're a greenblood, you oblivious moron." You lay still, hands to either side of his head; touching him any more than you already are is just going to make you _crazy_. "You're not psychic, but you're not apeshit fucking bananas. Thus: you have to be some kind of arsenic-blooded asshole. I dunno why you're hiding it anymore, it's not like there are any bluebloods left besides TZ and GZ around anymore. And TZ barely counts, anyway. But whatever, if hiding that is still what gets you off, I'll go along with it. I just need to know if you want to keep going, or if we need to stop."

"I'm not— look, I _want_ to." Karkat isn't hissing anymore, at least. "But I don't know if I could fill a bucket yet. It's— you have to know, you've gone through this already. I _want_ to, I've _tried_ , even, but there isn't anything there to actually come out yet. I think maybe in a couple of perigees, when I've got enough genetic material— it's just a matter of letting it build up. Maybe even faster than that, if we mess around in the meantime."

Your bloodpusher had sunk a little bit at the words _I don't know if I could fill a bucket yet_ ; you've been going crazy, sore with the genetic material gathering in you (because you'd have to ask someone for a bucket, because you can't work the alchemeiter by touch no matter how much Lalonde tries to add some kind of haptic interface so you can, and even with that obstacle surmounted you'd have to ask someone to make you something to use _inside_ , since you'd need pressure there and you don't want to shred your own nook open with your claws). But it lifts again at _if we mess around in the meantime_ , because maybe—

"You're probably way too embarrassed to ask anyone to alchemize that kind of shit for you, and I guess I can't blame you. I sure as hell made sure nobody else was around when I was making freaky shit with the alchemeiter, as does everyone else _who isn't Terezi_."

The thought of Karkat making that, the thought of Karkat _using_ it— sprawled out on a pile, legs spread wide so he could push the artificial pleasure apparatus into his nook— is what finally makes your bulge unsheathe, squirming against the front of your pants in a desperate attempt to touch him. His fingers would be at his seedflap, trying to coax his bulge out as the barest hint of light green trickled out of him; eventually it would slip out, slick and green, and wrap softly around his fingers. He would chirp out then, hips hitching up in a desperate little circle as he tried to hit the spot that would trigger his genetic material gland; as much as he wanted it, though, his body was still trying to hold all his genetic material in reserve for his first drone visit.

"Are you trying to kill me?" You ask him— he must be trying to make your head explode, telling you about the pity-inducing things he's done to himself. "Because if you are, it's working. Now all I can think of is you pailing yourself."

"It's not like I was very good at it," Karkat mutters, and you can feel the blush rising under his skin.

"Exactly," you say with a sharp, indrawn breath. "So fucking pitiful, KK. I remember how I was a couple of perigees ago, I wanted it so badly and I couldn't fucking _finish_ it. I bet you cried." He cries more than any other troll you've met, and now you can't get rid of the image of his face being almost as green-streaked as his thighs. 

Karkat lets out a throbbing little chirrup, low in his throat.

"You— stop making me sound like some kind of flushed porn star." And oh, he _does_ look like one in the picture you've got in your head, like someone from a barely-legal blueblood fetish porn. Not that he could be, for that kind of scene— even if you weren't both part of a dead race, you would both long since be fully concupiscent by the time you'd left Alternia and come anywhere near adults, porn-filming or otherwise.

"Then stop telling me all the pornographic things you do in your free time," you tell him, and that's when he throws himself hard enough to roll you both over and land on top of you. That seems to be a _thing_ with him, ending up on top like that.

"Shut up," is what he finally says when he stops ghosting almost-bites along the bone ridge under your throat. One of his hands comes up and takes the goggles off your face so that the black pits where you used to be able to see are bared for the entire multiverse to feel sorry for, as if he doesn't mind sharing you with every subatomic particle making up the thin radioactive slurry that flows between universes. And maybe he really _doesn't_ , maybe he's as generous with his flushed quadrant as he is with all of his others.

"Don't look," you tell him, and reach toward where you think you heard the goggles hit the floor. " _Don't_ , KK, why would you want to—"

He kisses the bottom edge of an empty socket, soft and dry, and the feel of his mouth against the sore skin there makes you warble despite yourself. It's a rush of stupid grub noise, but Karkat doesn't laugh; instead, he moves on to the other side, the same not-quite-pale brush of lips against barely-healed skin.

"If you can get off on me crying, I can get off on your stupid scars," he says, but he stops paying attention to your soft, battered edges and kisses the flush of your cheeks instead. It's still soft, gentle, the palest red you think probably exists without flipping your quadrant over sideways. Until he makes his way down to your mouth and you catch his lip in between your teeth to keep him there, anyway; he opens his mouth in surprise and you slip your tongue inside to color the kiss so red Terezi can probably taste it from the other side of the asteroid. It's messy and you're both making noise and this involves hardly any teeth, and it has you arching your hips up so your bulge presses against him through your clothes.

You can't feel _his_ bulge against you, but he growls and gets you by the wrists. That effectively ends your search for your goggles, especially after he lays his hands on top of yours and laces your claws together. His are shorter than yours, but broader in the bones and heavy over your long, glass-spun lines. They're every so slightly cool against you, but not in a strange or unpleasant way.

"Oh my god," you say in between breaths, mouths finally far enough apart for air to come between you. "You really are completely into the idea of this being some kind of magical red-quadrant moment from one of those shitty novels everybody knows you and Kanaya borrow from each other."

"You sure know how to fucking ruin a moment, Captor." He drops his forehead to rest against yours.

"Lies, I don't ruin anything." You smile against his cheek. 

_That's_ when you feel his bulge stir for the first time, and when you press the heel of your hand against it Karkat sighs and rolls his hips down into it. You take that as your cue to start undressing him-- it's not like he hasn't peeled various items of _your_ clothing off during your various makeouts, albeit usually at your own suggestion. His are more difficult than yours-- tight jeans, tight sweater-- but eventually you're both naked, clothes discarded in random directions, and Karkat is certainly capable of _something_ concupiscent. The first thing his bulge does when you're both settled back on the pile is twine up with yours, slick and writhing and reducing both of you to weak-kneed, half-trilling desperation.

"So how are we going to do this?" The logistics of it really are confusing— he could pail you from behind, maybe, so your bulge wouldn't instinctively go for him and possibly make things even worse.

"We're going to do this properly," he says, and climbs onto your lap, knees to either side of your thighs. He's almost as wet as you are, and his bulge is already untwining from yours in anticipation of getting into your nook. He's seriously overestimating the amount of time it's going to take him to be ready to really pail, if your memory of your own experience is anything close to correct.

"That's not going to be very good for you, is it?" You put a hand over the small of his back, light with the claws and fingers splayed wide, to keep him balanced on you.

"Newsflash, you nookstain, there are reasons for wanting you like this that have _nothing to do with getting off_." His bulge strokes around yours almost possessively, one long slick swipe that leaves you breathless. "I'm not pailing you from behind like some kind of goddamn kismesis the first time we do this. Yes, it's true, I absolutely need this to be some perfect romance novel scene where neither one of us knows what we're doing but we wind up climbing each other like fucking _trees_ and there's kissing and horn-rubbing the whole time and it's _fucking beautiful_. You can make fun of— _ah!_ "

Good to know: licking one of Karkat's horns makes him gasp; taking the whole thing into your mouth and sucking makes him trill like a porn star.

"I think that sounds nice," you tell him after you release his horn with one last lick. Between your newly chilled outlook and the fact that you've got your naked matesprit on your equally naked lap and you're about to pail, _fucking finally_ , you would probably have said that no matter _what_ he'd suggested. But you're not lying; it really does sound nice.

Karkat shifts on your lap, rising up onto his knees and spreading his thighs. You follow him, your body instinctively rising to meet his and your legs falling open; it's almost involuntary, the optimal position for pailing written into your genetic memory like it's a copy of the Troll Kama Sutra. He closes the gap between you, shimmying forward until you're chest to chest again; your bulge has the same idea, and untwines from his except for the very first coil that lets you slip around each other. You can feel his bulge pressing up against your nook, teasing and probing at the wet opening.

"Stop teasing, KK," you purr in his ear, and as you roll your hips forward the tip of your bulge starts to press into him.

" _Fuck_ ," he groans, and the sudden lukewarm slickness on your bulge is enough for it to slip reflexively up into his nook. His curse turns into a moan as you slide all the way in; your bulge is thinner than what you think is probably normal, but it's long; besides, Karkat doesn't sound like he minds the lack of girth one bit. "Fuck, _Sollux_ , how the hell _long_ are you?"

You thrash a little inside of him in response to both the (probably unintentional) flattering dirty talk and the press of him inside of you. He's short, but _thick_ , big enough around that the stretching stimulates the nerve clusters in your nook all on its own. When you do, he _arches_ in your arms, bowed so far he's almost pulled away, and his claws dig into your shoulders.

" _Oh my god_ ," he half-chirrups, words almost but not quite failing him.

You realize that your weird, long, skinny bulge has probably just bumped his genetic material gland directly, instead of stimulating it indirectly. That's the kind of thing you've only heard of in really out-there porn, and you've just accidentally done it to Karkat. And, by the sound of it, he likes it a hell of a lot.

The two of you fall into... well, it's not a rhythm, not in any meaning of the word; there's nothing repetitive about the desperate way you're both moving, squirming in pleasure and trying to kiss but mostly missing each other's mouths. One of your hands is still on his back, and the other is stroking one of his horns with featherlight fingers; he's digging his claws into your shoulders and hanging on as best he can.

"Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ \--" and then Karkat isn't even capable of saying his favorite word in the universe anymore; he just moans and chirrups and tries to force air down his windtube when he's not trying to land a kiss on you and failing. You can hear it all from your perfect Karkat-observing vantage point, every hitch and wheeze when he remembers that oxygen is almost as important as you are right now. Then he lifts one of his hands and fumbles it over the crown of your head, until his fingers close around one of your smaller set of horns and you forget how to talk. The bigger ones are just barely long enough not to make you shiver when something brushes up against them, but the smaller ones are even tinier than Karkat's and have just as many exposed nerves under his fingers as his do under yours.

"KK, oh _fuck_ ," and then you're not doing anything but trilling, as incoherent as he is. Neither of you manage anything that counts as an actual word after that, until one particular curl of his bulge inside of you hits your swollen, sore genetic material gland in just the right way and you know you can't hold on much longer. "KK, the bucket--"

He gets the bucket-- plucked from his sylladex after a frantic one-handed search that had taken long enough you're keening desperately by the time he finds it-- and shoves it between his knees and yours just in time. The blackness around you whites out and you _howl_ , and it feels like the entire world is shaking around you; you don't realize it actually _is_ shaking until you hear something hit the floor with a crash. You don't give a single fuck what it is, as long as it's not your main terminal and it's not the bucket shoved against your shaking legs; everything else can just go and break under the strain of your out of control telekinetic backlash for all you care now.

"Come _on_ , KK," you whine once you've got enough breath to; his bulge is swollen inside of you, thick enough most of your genetic material is still inside of your nook rather than in the pail, and it's pressing up against places suddenly oversensitive in an _uncomfortable_ way as it squirms.

"Sollux, I _can't_ ," he says, breathless—which is ridiculous, because any other words he might have been trying to say get lost in the sudden piercing trill he makes as he clenches around you, shaking so hard you’re glad he doesn’t have any telekinesis to lose his control over. He buries his face in your neck, horns to either side of your chin, as you both try to remember how to breathe; your bulges start to retract, slipping back into their sheaths, and there’s a corresponding sound of liquid hitting metal as your mingled genetic material is finally free to hit the pail.

That sound makes Karkat startle, and as soon as you’re both as finished as you’re going to be (you suddenly really want to soak in the ablution trap for awhile, or else you’re going to be dripping your own genetic material everywhere for _hours_ and quite frankly, that’s disgusting) he takes the bucket and captchalogues it.

“Need a souvenir, KK?” You ask him, and he growls as best someone who’s just orgasmed his brain out can. You reach out and pull him back on top of you, so that you’re both reclining in the pile again. These pillows must be completely fucking _ruined_ , and you don’t care. At least, you don’t care for about five minutes, at which time someone (predictably) feels the need to completely ruin the moment.

"How about you two keep your pants on until Captor learns how to not _knock the asteroid off course_ when he comes?" Strider asks from outside the door.

"I'm going to kill him," Karkat says, suddenly scenting sharp and black, and you flop down on his back to try and pin him down with your weight.

"Shut up, KK." You bite at his shoulder, and he actually lets out a huffing little laugh.

You really are going to be okay.


End file.
